After Charlie Hunnam portrayed infamous murderer Ed Gein in Netflix’s upcoming anthology series Monster: The Ed Gein Story, he revealed he visited his grave in a full circle moment.
While appearing on the Tuesday, September 30, episode of The Today Show, Hunnam, 45, shared that his longtime girlfriend, Morgana McNelis, told him, “Take some time after you finish, because when you come home, you should be ready to see me.”
“I’d been shooting in Chicago, I decided to stay for a week and sort of decompress so I was ready to see her when I got home,” he explained, implying that he wanted to get the character out of his system before returning to his normal life. “And it was about an 8-hour drive up to Wisconsin from where I was to where Ed grew up and where he’s buried.”
He added that he thought it would be a “good conclusion to go visit his grave and say what I wanted to say to him” as a way to officially leave the role in his past.
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Once he was at Gein’s grave, Hunnam said he told the murderer that he “hoped we had told his story honestly at the very least, and [I] didn’t invite him to come on the journey with me moving forward.”
“I was ready to say goodbye to him and that be the end,” Hunnam said.
Gein was a serial killer who infamously skinned human corpses in the 1950s, according to History.com.
After police found the headless, gutted body of missing store clerk Bernice Worden at his farmhouse in November 1957, an investigation was launched into his crimes and a collection of human skulls, furniture and clothing that were made from human body parts and skin were discovered on his property.
He told police he dug up the graves of women who recently died that reminded him of his mother, according to History.com. The remains of 10 women were ultimately found in Gein’s home. However, he was only linked to the murders of Worden and local woman Mary Hogan.
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During his appearance on Today, Hunnam said that Monster looks at the “huge cultural influence” Gein’s life had on cinema. “We sort of go back and look at the inspiration behind the inspiration for those films,” he said of Gein, who was rumored to have inspired horror films like The Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and more.
“I mean, prior to Ed Gein, our relationships with monsters in cinema were like Dracula, Frankenstein and werewolves, and Psycho was the pivot point where we became the monsters, and that was all of a direct consequence of the influence that Ed Gein had,” he said.
Hunnam went on to discuss the goal of the latest season of Ryan Murphy’s show.
“That’s one of the primary questions we ask in the show is, who is the monster? This boy who did terrible things but had been abused and left in isolation with untreated mental health issues, or this legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it for entertainment, and arguably darkened the American psyche in the process?” he said.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story premieres on Netflix on Friday, October 3.
